Nine Words
by sharp52092
Summary: Based on Stover's ROTS novelization, Dooku's death, but with a new twist.


**Nine Words**

**Based on Stover's ROTS novelization, Dooku's death, but with a new twist.**

**This is a oneshot. I do not own Star Wars.**

**And last, but certainly not least, thank you to CommChatter, my beta.**

* * *

This is the death of Count Dooku:

A starburst of clarity blossoms within Anakin Skywalker's mind, when he says to himself _Oh, I get it, now_ and discovers that the fear within his heart can be a weapon, too.

It that simple, and that complex.

And it is final.

Dooku is already dead. The rest is mere detail.

Anakin Skywalker has already decided.

The play is still on; the comedy of lightsabers flashes and snaps and hisses. Dooku & Skywalker, a one-time-only command performance, for an audience of one. Jedi and Sith and Sith and Jedi spinning, whirling, crashing together, slashing and chopping, parrying, binding, slipping and whipping and ripping the air around them with snarls of power.

Dooku's decades of combat experience are irrelevant. His mastery of swordsplay is useless. His vast wealth, his political influence, impeccable breeding, immaculate manner, exquisite taste‑all the pursuits and points of pride to which he has devoted so much of his time and attention over the long, long years of his life‑are now chains hung upon his spirit, bending his neck before the ax.

Even his knowledge of the Force has become a joke.

It is this knowledge that shows him his death, makes him handle it, turn it this way and that in his mind, examine it in detail like a black gemstone so cold it burns. Dooku's elegant farce has degenerated into bathetic melodrama, and not one shed tear will mark the passing of its hero.

The earlier words _"Rage is your weapon! Strike now! Strike! Kill him!"_ seemed to have unlocked something in Skywalker.

Approval?

Unsealed shielding around a furnace‑a fiery storm and all the fears and the doubts shrivel in its flame.

But Palpatine's words rage have given Anakin permission to unseal the shielding around his furnace, and all his fears and all his doubts shrivel in its flame.

Dooku understood…

Rage is Anakin Skywalker's weapon.

When Dooku flies at him, blade flashing, and Skywalker strikes back. It was almost as if he was blocking another‑striking another.

When with all the power that the Dark Side can draw from throughout the universe, Dooku hurls a jagged fragment of the durasteel table. Skywalker smashes it aside.

H had become a storm. Dooku meters back can sense the storm gathering in the boy, but not in his mind. No, his mind is as clear as a crystal bell.

Because he has decided.

Not the Count, but Skywalker.

Anakin Skywalker decides…

He decides to win.

He decides that Dooku should lose the same hand he took.

And so he does.

Decision is reality here. The hand falls with a bar of scarlet blaze still extending from its spastic death grip, and Anakin's heart sings for the fall of the red blade.

He reaches out and the Force catches it for him.

And then Anakin takes Dooku's other hand as well.

Dooku crumbles to knees; face blank, mouth slack, and his weapon whirs through the air to the victor's hand, and Anakin finds vision of the future happening before his eyes: two blades at Count Dooku's throat.

But here, now, the truth belies the dream. Both lightsabers, are in his _hands_, his lightsaber blazes in his durasteel hand, and the one of flesh flares with the synthetic bloodshine of a Sith blade.

Dooku cringing, shrinking with dread, still finds some hope in his heart that he is wrong, that Palpatine has not betrayed him, that this has all been proceeding according to plan‑

Until he hears "Good, Anakin! Good! I _knew_ you could do it!" and registers this is Palpatine's voice and feels within the darkest depths of all he is the approach of the words that come next.

"Kill him," Palpatine says. "Kill him now."

In Skywalker's eyes he saw only flames.

"Chancellor‑" he gasps.

There was no point in begging.

"What?" Palpatine said coldly. As cold as intergalactic space. "Show mercy? Not when you used me as bait to kill my friends."

And he knew, then, that all has indeed been going according to plan. Sidious' plan, not his own. This had been a Jedi trap indeed, but Jedi were not the quarry.

They were the bait.

"Anakin," Palpatine says quietly. "Finish him."

Years of Jedi training made Anakin hesitate; he looked down upon Dooku and sees not a Lord of the Sith, but a beaten, broken, cringing man.

"I shouldn't‑"

But Palpatine barked, "Do it! Now!" Anakin realizes that this isn't an order. This it is, in fact, nothing more than what he's been waiting for his whole life.

Permission.

And he looked into the eyes of Anakin Skywalker for the final time, Count Dooku knows that he has been deceived not just today, but for many, many years. That he has never been the true apprentice. That he has never been the heir to the power of the Sith. He has been only a tool.

His whole life‑all his victories, all his struggles, all his heritage, all his principles and his sacrifices, everything he's done, everything he owns, everything he's been, all his dreams, and grand vision for the future Empire and the Army of Sith‑have been only a pathetic sham, because all of them, all of him, add up to only this.

He has existed only for this.

This.

To be the victim of Anakin Skywalker's first cold-blooded murder.

_First, but not_, he knows, _the last_.

But before he dies, he says something.

Eight words, and the ninth is cut off.

He did not even, in some ways, understand why he said it.

It did not matter.

It would not make a difference.

Nor would it register in Skywalker's ears. The boy had already made up his mind. His strike coming.

He had decided.

And so had Dooku…

His final action, before his death.

He does not say it for the boy. _No_, certainly not him. Maybe for Obi-Wan. While he did not know practically well, he cared for him in his own way.

_"He's practically my grandson"_

But most of all he does it for Obi-Wan's Master, Qui-Gon.

_"His Master was my Padawan"_

His friend.

_His son._

And he looks over to the other Sith.

His Master.

His deceiver.

The Chancellor.

Soon to be Emperor.

At this moment he was no longer a beaten, old man.

And he was no longer a Sith.

And no, he certainly wouldn't go as far to say Jedi.

Instead, for the first in a very long time, despite what had just taken place‑what was about to take place, he felt… at _peace_.

_"Beware Skywalker," _he quietly states, _"Treachery is the way of the Si‑"_

Then the blades crossed at his throat uncross like scissors.

_Snip._

And all of him became nothing at all.

_End._


End file.
